Equality now! Let's Talk Together is live

In this section, we focused on two fundamental questions:

• How egalitarian are civil society organizations internally? 
• How does a gender perspective become embedded in institutional structures?

Where does equality stand on the agenda of our organizations? Is it a topic only remembered on certain days? Or is it an approach embedded at the heart of the organization, from decision-making processes to the budget, from language used to the space and application mechanisms? First, we handed the microphone to civil society organizations from all over Turkey. 

We listened to numerous experiences, from complaint and feedback mechanisms to creating safe spaces, from the challenges of finding suppliers compatible with a gender perspective to field practices. There were problems. But there were also solutions produced for these problems.

This section showed us the following: The issue is not just representation. The issue is power relations, participation, safe spaces, and data.

In the studio, moderated by Umut Güven, we talked with our guest İlknur Üstün about how equality can be embedded in organizational culture. We discussed how complaint and feedback mechanisms should be established within the organization and how policy documents can be transformed into “living” documents.

Zehra Tosun and Özge Konuralp, who have worked for many years in the field of gender equality, emphasized that gender equality is not an additional activity, but an integral part of institutional development. They shared concrete steps, from updating self-assessment tools to developing gender-sensitive indicators.

In the field, we listened to how the neighborhood association Çiğdemim Derneği sparked a transformation by changing language and redistributing invisible tasks.

We also examined how Amnesty International Turkey has established an internal application and feedback mechanism against rights violations, and how it has transformed its gender equality policy document into a security framework based on confidentiality and declaration.

Gender equality is not an “additional topic.” It’s a choice about how we work, how we make decisions, and what kind of culture we build. Let’s talk about it together…